All about the World Emoji Day ???

And also how brands can work those emoji for their next marketing campaign

World emoji day was just 2 days ago and some of you may be wondering why am i writing a whole article on emoji now? Well, apparently although these tiny pictorial icons may not have replaced text for now, they are getting closer. Ever since the adoption of the emoji keyboard, emoji has revolutionized digital communication.

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They are so commonly used and popular that an annual celebration “World Emoji Day” is held to commemorate these icons. Also, there is even a whole movie on them – Emoji Movie, that is scheduled to be released on July 28, 2017. Monday was the fourth annual World Emoji Day and many took part in the celebration using the official hashtag #worldemojiday.

Here are some fun facts on emoji and the World Emoji Day 2017:

Why is World Emoji Day on July 17? That’s simply because it’s the date on the official calendar emoji itself!

There is a whole World Emoji Award going on every year that crown the top, most anticipated and lifelong achievement awards to emoji.

Standing at 244,120 likes, the top liked post with the #worldemojiday hashtag is from @chelseafc who asked its followers to engage in a conversation by commenting two emoji that best describe what the photo means to them. The post received a total of 5,473 comments and was the top commented post among all.

Here on this post by @uefachampionsleague, they played a little “game” by hiding some players’ face with the sunnies emoji and made their followers guess! That’s one interesting way to engage your followers, isnt it?

This is one example of how brands hopped onto the trend and posted in line with the World Emoji Day. With over 12 million followers worldwide, @gopro ‘s video featured a sleepy dog (he yawned halfway!) in shades making some real cool music! This garnered over 1 million views and followers were in love with the music, or was it just the dog?

Yet another example of how brands took part in the celebration creatively. With just three simple icons, @sephora communicated the power and beauty of emoji. Through the post, Sephora also promoted its very own emoji keyboard – Sephojis!

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The total reach and engagement during World Emoji Day alone is immense. Research has shown that about 92% of the online population have used emojis at least once, 30% of them use emoji multiple times a day and they are definitely on their way to becoming the new internet slang. Beyond being fun and whacky, people are using emoji because they are able to improve online communication, be understood better and simply express themselves in the most effective and relevant way. Emoji are not only widely use on messenger platforms, they are equally popular on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

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Now, let’s see whether there’s a place for emoji in the modern marketing. It has been revealed that there has been a staggering 777% increase in the use of emojis in branded campaign. With these figures, companies are starting to take emoji more seriously and many forward-thinking brands are incorporating creative use of emoji into their marketing campaign.

What does all these mean for brands? What can brands do with emoji?

With the ability to add emoji to caption, comments, stories and even hashtags on Instagram – they are endless ways to use these icons to create an impact brand message on this platform alone!

Using for daily conversation

Emoji is the language of the new generation, especially the millennials who are a huge market for most brands. The way to their heart is to engage in a conversation with them, and what better way than to use something they are familiar with and use every single day – emoji.

Emoji helps to make it less a brand less corporate and the content delivered more relatable and easily digested. A brand’s clever deployment of emoji can also reflect its personality and culture from witty jokes, effective recovery and clever replies as shown below.

Twitter

To promote its new S8 series, Samsung took to Twitter and asked its followers to show the first photo they took with their new phone. When a user gave a totally inappropriate reply, Samsung nailed it with a single emoji reply! Users on Twitter went crazy in love with Samsung’s response, retweeting the response 18,000 times!

Using for campaigns

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Be fun, be creative! That’s exactly what McDonald‘s did for its “Good Times” campaign where a series of emoji created a narrative comic. The campaign helped re-establish McDonald’s as part of the pop-cultural conversation. It also proved that marketing ideas do not necessarily need to be complicated to be effectve.

Daily Billboard

To publicize for the Deadpool movie, billboards with the 3 emojis were seen around different areas. They were just a series of skull emoji, poop emoji and a blocky letter L. The marketing idea is so simple, so dumb – yet incredibly hilarious and effective.

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Finally, it is important to keep in mind these few points when crafting the next online message with emoji:

Stay relevant – Use relevant emoji that best describes your brand and one that resonate with your audience in the right context

Know the meaning – There can be several meaning (official or not) to a few emoji so do take note and not use the wrong one!

Emojis are more than just cute and fun visuals. These global iconic language can help to give an instant snapshot of a brand’s personality and boost its presence and relevancy in the online space. Are you expressing the right way now?